Need a break? Jump-into this vacation card and get away, hear the waves gentling coming ashore, the occasional seabird crying out overhead, smell the sea air and feel the grit of the sand beneath your feet.

This fun, A7 sized card came from my desire to make a nautical themed card from my stash of underwater, fishy, and nautical stamps, dies, papers and embossing folders. The papers and embossed/inked background came from one of early papercrafting magazines I purchased – Love Cardmaking issue 4 and its the “By the Shore” embossing folder, stamps and digi papers. I love these papers and have used them for to make a number of cards in years past. Two small stamp sets from Prima Marketing’s Seashore collection at some point made their way into my stash, but never used. Some new to me Stampin’ Up inkpads gave me the excuse to try stamping the small nautical stamps.

After pulling together all the various elements that I might use and having noticed a trend of shapes being layered askew on card fronts, I decided to try the trend. I played with the layout and began by gluing the blue background over the front and back of card. Next, I glued edges of inked embossing folder piece and trimmed off the overlaps that went off the edges. The top is wrapped over the fold and glued on the back.

Using two different thicknesses of foam squares/dimenisionals, I adhered the stamped pieces to the front. The rectangular card needed somethings to hide the fact the rope border didn’t fully meet-up at the corners. In digging around in my elements caddy, I found some K & Company die-cut sea life images which were all too big for my purposes, but on the packaging were just the right size of images which I fussy cut and adhered to the rope corners. The addition of a puffy orange starfish and a foiled rising sun sticker and, voila, the front was finished.

I had one tiny multi-colored masked and stamped image with the word “Enjoy” which I glued inside the card.  The blue paper on the back of the card didn’t come completely down to the bottom edge so I pieced together a sandy beach to complete the card.

The sailing ship was stamped in blue ink on the back of the envelope.